Quotes about Understanding

In a healthy family, you know how love is defined: It's clear, has boundaries, and is attainable. Unfortunately, in a shame-bound family, love is a moving target; one day it's this and one day it's that, and just when you're sure you've got it figured out, you discover you don't.

How readily we push Jesus Christ off his judgment seat and take our place there to pronounce on others (though we've neither the knowledge nor the authority to judge anyone.) None of us has ever seen a motive. Therefore, we don't know, we can't do anything more than suspect what inspires the action of another.

It was C. S. Lewis who said, "We need to be reminded more than instructed.

God not only loves me as I am, but also knows me as I am.

We are sons and daughters of the Most High and maturing in tenderness to the extent that we are for others--all others--to the extent that no human flesh is strange to us, to the extent that we can touch the hand of another in love, to the extent that for us there are no others.

Jesus comes not for the super-spiritual but for the wobbly and the weak-kneed who know they don't have it all together, and who are not too proud to accept the handout of amazing grace. As we glance up, we are astonished to find the eyes of Jesus open with wonder, deep with understanding, and gentle with compassion.

Our hearts of stone become hearts of flesh when we learn where the outcast weeps.

In solitude we realize that nothing human is alien to us.

The mystery of one man is too immense and too profound to be explained by another man.

When two people have become present to each other, the waiting of one must be able to cross the narrow line between the living or dying of the other.

To die to our neighbors means to stop judging them, to stop evaluating them, and thus to become free to be compassionate. Compassion can never coexist with judgment because judgment creates the distance, the distinction, which prevents us from really being with the other.

What makes us human is not our mind but our heart, not our ability to think but our ability to love.